Memory is notorious for playing tricks on the mind. To think that we can pack up the past and move forward, seamlessly, without looking backwards, is a flawed pattern of thought. Leaning into the past, despite the emotional resistance it may present, is entirely necessary, and filmmakers Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige know this well. After all, it’s rubble beneath their film, Memory Box.
Based on a set of Hadjithomas’s true relics from her youth in Beirut, Lebanon, Memory Box explores both the intimate memories of an individual and the collective memories of a community during the 15-year-long Lebanese Civil War. As the story opens through the lens of an iPhone interface capturing the heavy snowfall of a typical Montréalais winter day, we quickly are introduced to the film’s teenage protagonist, Alex (Paloma Vauthier). Alex, who lives with her mother, Maia (Rim Turki), is preparing for a quiet Christmas with Teta (Clemence Sabbagh), her mother’s mother. However, things become complicated when a box arrives from Lebanon addressed to Maia, postmarked from her best friend from her youth. Immediately throwing Teta into a static of panic, the box is relegated to the basement as Teta and Maia forbid Alex to open it. “She won’t understand,” says Teta, as she implores Maia to keep the contents secure from her daughter. Alex’s rebellion gets the best of her, and to the other women’s dismay, she secretly explores the contents of the box.
The rest of the film plays out like a story within a story. Inside the box are journals, photographs, and cassette tapes that Maia had made as a way to stay in touch with her best friend Lisa after she had left Lebanon during the war. Her past is a tragic one that she clearly is hiding for the sole sake of protecting her daughter: there were horrendously tragic familial deaths, mourning, lost loves, and the recourse of escaping to a new life. In spite of the tragedy, though, the narrative style is spellbinding, delivering a mixed media representation of what Maia’s life was like during her teenage years: 35mm photographs crafted ensembles, voice recordings, film flashbacks, visual effects, and an astounding soundtrack of ‘80s English new wave bops attest to the true artistic flare of both Hadjithomas and Joreige who, as parents, decided to make the film when their daughter wanted to explore her mother’s history.
Once the remarkable narrative techniques are integrated into the film, however, the plot slows to a near stop, and the tonal shifts of the film are not very cohesive. The more that Alex uncovers, the more she turns in her head, and the head-on collision that occurs when her mother finds out about her daughter’s disobedience is not very climactic, nor does it seem natural. If the first two acts of the film are top quality, the third act entirely loses its flavor to the point where the preceding scenes lose their strife. The film ends on a medium note, with an interesting narrative turn emblematized by beautiful images of Lebanon, but there is little depth in how the three women’s story arcs reach their respective finales. Ultimately, I think Hadjithomas and Joreige would have been able to take the film farther in a deeper dive into the intergenerational trauma of the three women, without such an all-consuming recourse in the past. A more stable equilibrium between the past and the present undoubtedly speaks louder to the poignancy of memory.
